A pedestrian will die from a car accident every one hundred and eleven minutes. Some of these fatalities will give rise to a lawsuit. These are complex lawsuits which are often ardently defended by insurance companies and include difficult medical, accident reconstruction and legal issues.

For any motor vehicle accident case, insurance company adjustors, if they recommend any settlement offer whatsoever, are going to make the offer based not on the plaintiff's injuries and loses but instead on the financial risk faced by the insurance company. There are many ways in which insurance companies make an effort to control their risk. For example, these cases often involve (1) denials of liability by the defendants (driver, employer, others who contributed to the accident) and the insurance companies insuring the defendants; (2) insurance issues ; (3) economic issues (including whether the victim was married and had any children (especially minor children), the age and general health of the victim, and the loss of future earning capacity) that impact the valuation of the case; and (4) non-economic issues that affect case valuation. A lawyer handling one of these claims thus needs to have the skill and experience to deal successfully with all of the challenges that will likely arise in the lawsuit. Consider the following:

In one case the victim was a 66 year old female who was trying to cross a street. The female pedestrian was thrown 27 feet by the force of the accident. The impact and her fall left her with a fracture to her ankle, fractures to multiple ribs, a fracture to her clavicle, and fractures to her skull. Following the accident she was taken to a hospital where she died from her injuries. She left behind a husband, five children, and six grandchildren. The law firm that represented her family reported that they obtained a $725,000 settlement at mediation. In a different case, the victim, a male pedestrian, was also killed on account of the accident. He was survived by two children. He worked at a part time job. The law firm which represented the family of the victim reported a settlement for the sum of $1.15 million.

Each lawsuit had to do with a pedestrian fatality. Both cases had to do with significant settlements. Still the documentation of these claims fail to explain how the settlement amount was computed. It could be that each represents the top range of available insurance. It could be that each settlement could reflect the historical range of awards by juries in the jurisdictions where each of the lawsuits would have gone to trial. Maybe each settlement might reflect other ıssues. For instance, in the second case the victim worked part-time while in the first case there is no discussion of the plaintiff having a job. Considering the age of the victim in that lawsuit, however, it is rather likely that she was retired. Also, In the second first lawsuit the victim had children. The reports fail to document whether the children were minors or adults. In the first case the victim had five children, but given her age, it is likely all her children were adults. Grandchildren frequently have no standing to make a claim for the death of a grandparent. These differences might be the reason for why the recovery in the second case was fifty three percent more than in the first lawsuit.

The smaller the risk an insurance company adjuster believes is faced by taking the lawsuit to trial, the smaller the offer they will make, if they make an offer at all. Handling pedestrian death matters requires experience and skill. An attorney representing the victim’s family should not be in a rush to settle the case. Indeed, often the best way to handle these cases is to perform a comprehensive investigation, have a deep understanding of the accident scene, know the way in which witnesses describe the accident, have a sense of how the parties and the witnesses will be perceived by a jury, and have a good awareness of the range of awards typically awarded for similar cases by juries in the jurisdiction where the claim will need to go to trial.